Bagatellen

Five Finns, Fee-Free

The Bags Blog normally operates under a Post No Bills policy, those self-multiplying ads for Penis Enlargement creams, Texas Hold ‘Em, and mint mouthwash from months back notwithstanding. But recent news from saxophonist James Finn begs exception to the strictly-enforced brocard. It appears he’s inked a deal with Emusic that makes the complete CDR catalog of his own Ginko Leaf label available for download through the popular online subscription service. Couple that with a gratis membership offer currently being trumpeted by Emusic and the consequence is a quincunx of Finn concerts for less than the price of a gumball. Not a bad deal.

I’ve heard the first four titles and can uniformly recommend them, though formal reviews are still sequestered in the process of formulation and forthcoming. The Last Matador and Into the Afterworld complete the concept trilogy introduced by Plaza de Toros (Clean Feed). Both find him engaging drummers Warren Smith & Klaus Kugel in a series of sagacious, often volatile exchanges and also debut his soprano and flute on disc, his skills on which rival (though don’t surpass) his incantatory tenor. Inside Eye and Live at the Via Della Pace continue the dual drums format with the teams of Smith joined by Michael Thompson and Newman Taylor Baker respectively. The latter packs an especially large wallop. Taped less than three weeks ago, In Stravinsky’s House returns Finn to the trio format of his first three releases with Dominic Duval and Baker lending callused hands in support- it definitely goes on my list.

Ginko Leaf truly is a godsend for Finn fans, a means by which the saxophonist has more than doubled his discography without having to wait for the largess of other established labels (though two other albums are slated for Fall release on Not Two and NEMU). Here’s hoping the prolific release pace continues unabated. In the meantime listeners have a felicitous means to play catch-up.

Spontaneous Music Ensemble - A New Distance

Emanem 4115

It’s always a blow when an esteemed improviser leaves the planet, but John Stevens passing was especially adverse. As one of the linchpins and pioneering provocateurs of British free improv his career stretched from the genre’s origins in the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, pulling in several generations of collaborators along the way. In the wake of his passing, the sum of his industrious activity intimated that there were still volumes left to say. Fortunately mics were common at many of his conclaves over the years. Subsequent releases have afforded renewed opportunities to address his artistry along with the sobering awareness that the cistern is now finite in depth.

The material collected on this new Emanem was recorded late in Stevens’ life. The disc combines the contents of an album originally released on the Acta imprint presenting two concert performances from ‘94, with a short snippet from a studio date recorded the previous year with flautist Neil Metcalfe as fourth member of the ensemble. These addendum pieces, further divisible into a string of brief component collages, are sandwiched by a trio of equally revealing spoken word segments. Conveyed in a measured Cockney drawl, Stevens’ musings on collective improvisation as an extension of and response to everyday mental wiring toward kinesics, are both calming and affirming in their clarity. They’re also a direct corollary to his playing, which always seemed to sustain an earthy integrity in its subversion of conventional idiomatic forms and careful cognizance of group dynamics.

Dedicated to an aged Gambian drummer of Stevens’ acquaintance, the eponymous “Stig” takes shape over twenty-five plus minutes. Saxophonist John Butcher traffics in his customary puckered reed flutters and ethereal overtones, the sounds of avian chirrups aped precisely by his ceiling-register reed whistles. Stevens’ presides over a modest kit of snares and cymbals outfitted with small piles of detritus. Roger Smith tugs and scrapes at the strings and body of his Spanish guitar, scaring up brittle needlepoint patterns that are frequently as percussive as those fashioned by the drummer. The three press forward, beating a sedulous path without the need for premeditated compass checks or reconnoitered itineraries. Stevens’ mini-trumpet makes a welcome appearance at various intersections, voicing clarion tones that braid with Butcher’s limpid soprano in a brocade that is vaguely Eastern in texture and thread count.

The middle foursome of tracks cover more truncated tracts of ground and illustrate the trio’s acumen at editing their interplay into consequently economical morsels. On “So This is Official” Stevens clatter and Smith’s scuttling combines in a porous crosshatch of widely-spaced cues for Butcher’s tenor to perforate and embroider. “Uneasy Options” starts off subdued, building speed on sustained spectral skirls from tenor and trumpet bracketed by pliant string snaps and the dull patter of key pads and brushes. Even at just over an hour in duration the disc provokes the natural inclination to entreat: “please sir, may I have some more?”

~ Derek Taylor

Clive Bell and Sylvia Hallett - The Geographers (Emanem)

Emanem 4112

In order to find the roots of improvisation, the communicative act that has infused music since its earliest inception, it is necessary to look beyond the tempered scale and bandstand practices to non-tempered and ritualistic practices that imbue those most ‘basic’ ways of making music. To be sure, there are several ways in which non-western source material have found their way into contemporary improvisation. As a spiritual communion, a celebratory act of reverence and worship of sound run through the mill of jazz and western classical music as well as China, India, Japan, Turkey and points in between, ‘ethnic improvisation’ has informed the Sea Ensemble and Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society, among others. Of a more direct approach, and conceived to gain both a more diverse palette and a constancy of new playing situations, the use of an entire catalog of non-western and homemade instruments has informed the work of composers like Mauricio Kagel and the improvisation group New Phonic Art (Michel Portal, Vinko Globokar, Carlos Roqué Alsina, Jean-Pierre Drouet).

Somewhere in between reverence and a knotty neo-dadaist approach to process lies the duo of Clive Bell and Sylvia Hallett. Hallett, a regular fixture in the London Improvisers’ Orchestra as a violinist (see Bagatellen for a review of the LIO’s latest), has worked since the mid-1970s with many of England’s most vanguard improvisers, a tireless explorer of high harmonics and lengthy bowed tones: violin, viola, cello, sarangi, bowed bicycle wheels, saws, electronically-produced sounds and voice have all entered into her lexicon. Bell, primarily a shakuhachi player (he studied the instrument in Tokyo) and a collector of Asian mouth instruments, has worked in the LIO as well as with the BBC Symphony; The Geographers is their first recorded duo. Something one has to keep in mind when listening to Hallett and Bell (or any of the above mentioned ensembles) is inherent in the title of The Geographers: making an aesthetic, creative map of the world does, on many occasions, require cultural juxtaposition. Such a concept is part and parcel of this music – as in New Phonic Art, where it is highly doubtful that any other musical situation could employ zurna, alphorn, pipe organ and tabla in a quartet improvisation, so Cretan pipes, electronics and bowed bicycle spokes probably have not met before this duo. Luckily, The Geographers appears as a balance between reverent and post-structural juxtaposition, humming electronics and high harmonics from Hallett’s arsenal girding and filling out the traditionally-played, plaintive and full-bodied sound of Bell’s various pipes and flutes. “Shrugging into Spring” opens with percussion and dissonant reed cries from Bell’s pi saw (a Thai free reed instrument) before segueing into an intense bout of shakuhachi and viola, a slowly building overture of disparates. Sarangi and shakuhachi are employed for “Flying on the Landing,” an exploration of controlled violence, Bell’s shakuhachi given a pinched, terse vocabulary to mate with the sarangi’s 35 tuned blades. The khene, a Chinese harmonica, is given a hymnal workout (indeed, as an instrument, it has a processional quality) to an underpinning of bowed bicycle spokes in “With the Book Propped Up Against the Horse’s Mane.” To be sure, there is a foray into wispy bent notes and wide vibratos commingling, saw and breath in “The Weald,” the thirteen-minute centerpiece in which Bell’s shakuhachi takes on a distinctly bowed, shrill character, a thicker grade of metal to match Hallett’s saw.

Juxtapositions, while undeniably present, are often subtle and, as Bell and Hallett are well aware of the potential of both instrumentation and listening ability, ironic commentary is quashed by the complementary beauty that each is able to bring from their vocabulary. With The Geographers, Clive Bell and Sylvia Hallett have created a rather visceral meditation on sound – leaving one to wonder whether the originators of musical communication had such power in mind.

I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night

Last night I dreamed that I organized a recording session with pianist Cecil Taylor, Slayer/Fantomas drummer Dave Lombardo and Orthrelm/Flying Luttenbachers guitarist Mick Barr. We were in a really nice studio in midtown NYC.

In the big main space, I'd gotten Cecil one of those 97-key Bösendorfer Imperial pianos with the huge, thundering low end - the one he plays on The Willisau Concert (Intakt). Man, that CD is life-changing; if you haven't heard it, go get one. Seriously.

Lombardo was in his own room with all his drums, including a giant gong like the one Alex Van Halen used to have. And Mick was isolated, too, miked super-close to capture that buzzy, ultra-trebley electronic tone he's got on the new Orthrelm disc OV (which is another must-hear; see if you can do better than Ben Ratliff of the New York Times, who claims to love it even though he hasn't made it all the way to the end yet).

I dreamt that the trio had two days of intense rehearsal before the all-day recording session, and that my only instructions to them were to work out a couple Barr-Taylor unison phrases that they could use to anchor the proceedings, and that other than that, I just wanted avalanches and tsunamis. Some delicate moments would be fine, but I was after serious earth-moving, skull-cracking music.

And in my dream, that's what they gave me. I wound up with two CDs' worth of material, stuff that was unbelievably intense, with all the stylistic hallmarks of the three men combined into a roaring, living whole that was vastly more than the sum of its parts. Cecil's baroque explosions on the piano combined with Mick's insectile buzzing and Lombardo's hellish battery to create a music unlike anything ever heard on earth, and I sat in the control room, listening to it pour forth from the speakers like hot mercury, shimmering and seemingly possessed of its own consciousness as it filled the world.

It was beautiful. And if I ever win the lottery, that's what I'm going to spend the money on.

What are the "dream sessions" of other Bagatellenites? What music would you make exist, if you could?

Done Got Old

Back from a six-day sojourn in NYC where I depressingly found myself victim of the Rip Van Winkle effect (self portraiture above) and muttering the lyrics to Junior Kimbrough’s titular ode to senectitude. Once blessed with a body & psyche that could handle the consecutive nightly rigors of the Vision Festival schedule and still split a cord of wood and till a score of acreage each successive morning, I now find my robust constitution humbled by the challenge. I only summoned the stamina to attend three nights & each left me reeling in a bleary-eyed stupor at its close (7+ hours of music tends to tax all but the most enamored souls). Part of the problem stemmed from the last minute venue switch and a melding of performance schedules that were originally designed to be split over two stages (a change that carried with it a hefty additional price tag of $16K). But even though my physical powers have seemingly dwindled, the chance to witness the spectacle was still a memorable & welcome one.

By my lights the Orensanz Art Center, a converted and artfully-crumbling synagogue space, is a near ideal venue, at least from a visual standpoint. What it lacks in acoustics, it nearly makes up for in architecture. Arched ceilings and terraced balconies rim a central room that comfortably seats a few hundred and stretches three stories high. Plenty of wall space for artwork and a section on the second floor reserved for a copious expanse of merch and concession tables provided further means to while away the time between musical sets. One big glaring minus, the anointed emcee for the event. Poet Steve Dalachinsky has held the post in past years, but this time the mantle went to some guy operating under the sobriquet Zero Boy. Assaulting the audience with microphone-enhanced sound effects and faulty free-associative political comedy he quickly became a whipping post for purists and moderates alike. The constant sales spiels for his own $5 cds worked like fast-acting abrasives on audience nerves.

Other familiar regulars offset Zero Boy’s antics. Margaret Davis with her hand-crafted buttons and boundless enthusiasm; Jeff Schlanger, the Music Witness, with his flying kaleidoscopic paint and studiously hunched form; Dalachinsky with his self-deprecating faux Beat schlemiel persona and so many others. It was also a very valuable forum to meet new faces and catch up with old ones including several in the Bags orbit (Brian and Steve G., hat tipped to you both) and Pedro Costa of Clean Feed who kept a schedule far more rigorous than mine, but was always ready with a warm smile and a friendly word. Great to see and chat with Frank Rubolino too, who could be found nightly perched stage side, his chair outfitted with a jury-rigged back cushion, snapping an endless succession of beautiful shots with his digital camera. On the flip, there was Ted Panken, whose easy-to-rankle ego was a downright unpleasant surprise and the source of an instant note-to-self to accord wide berth to the bald-domed, bespectacled haphephobe in the future. Any one else had a run-in with this guy? Rarely am I visited with the urge to punch someone out, but Panken prompted me to ponder the action.

But on to more pleasant memories. Thursday’s Fred Anderson Day allowed a chance to celebrate the venerable Chicagoan in two contexts: a Song For ‘reunion’ match-up with Joseph Jarman and the perennial tandem favorite of Fred locking tenors with Kidd Jordan, backed by the au courant rhythm team of William Parker and Hamid Drake. Mixed in with these main events, Nicole Mitchell’s Trio, Thurman Barker’s Strike Force Percussion Quintet and Joseph Jarman’s Ensemble represented a continuum from revelatory to humdrum. Fred seemed genuinely moved by the hosannas and conjured up some deeply soulful blowing in response. He might be wearing his advanced age a bit more prominently these days, but his acumen on tenor is hardly diluted by the added gray. Blue Winter, his new double-disc set on Eremite, also sketches a profile of vernal vigor.

Saturday and Sunday had their moments too with exciting sets by the Billy Bang Quartet and Joe McPhee with (unknown to me) bass clarinetist Lori Freedman. Bang’s group looked like an awkward assemblage on paper with Ngo Thanh Nahn on dan tranh, Todd Nicholson on bass and the wildcard Shoji Hano on trap kit. Hano barely tempered his usual boisterous, skin-splitting style and at first he made for an incongruous counterpart to Nahn’s delicate plucking. Bang acted as charismatic bridge, coaxing his sidemen into a brazen funk jam at one point that joyfully jostled from one pocketed riff to the next. Leroy Jenkins set followed. Sans amplification, dressed in a white cotton tunic and pants he looked uncannily like a relative of Ravi Shankar. Joined by dancer Felicia Norton he sculpted minimalist drones that set a contingent of the audience to shushing the vocal and antsy minority in their midst. The effect reminded me strangely of a Cage piece with every sneeze, floor creak, chair scrape & mumble adding and shaping the music’s formation. Maybe not wholly successful, but a fascinating exercise nonetheless.

The situation led my friend Ted to joke speculatively on the sound engineer set-up stage side and suggest the presence of a sheet of paper taped to the console dictating the proper levels for each performer.

Soji Hano: -8
Brötzmann: -6
Billy Bang: -2
William Parker: +2
Bill Dixon: +4
Leroy Jenkins: +8
Etc.

Eddie Gale’s Now Band featured an odd assemblage of players too with John Gruntfest and Ismael Navarette officiating on saxophones and pianist Valerie Mih and drummer T.Squire Holman joining William Parker as the rhythm section. Gale seemed disgruntled about the sound from the start, lamenting Mih’s place in the mix and repeatedly chastising the sound crew for his dead vocal mic. The ill will ended up coloring the playing and the band ended up faltering despite some solid playing by the leader and Gruntfest. The latter man was a pleasant surprise, blowing velocious and chopped lines on alto and obviously having a grand time doing it.

PaNic, a collective of dancers led by Patricia Nicholson and coupled with the music of Rob Brown’s trio (WP on bass, Alvin Fielder on drum) experienced a similarly mixed set. In front of a revolving PowerPoint slide show depicting Baraka-style the beauty and ugliness in the world the musicians and dancers acted out a salmagundi of emotions from rage, to love, to resignation, to hope. From my vantage, the end result was unfortunately significantly less than the sum of the parts.

McPhee’s set was originally slotted to cap the night, but an MIA Nasheet Waits necessitated a schedule flip, that ended up presciently opportune. Brötz and Waits injected their sign-off set with a fair share of bluster, but the whole seemed a checkered affair to my ears, tea-kettle steam blasts giving way to more measured and effective waves of heat. On the other hand, McPhee and Freeman achieved a stunning degree of rapport, overlapping and anticipating in a deep listening manner that their peers rarely touched.

Sunday supplied the grand finale and yet another endurance test. After a dining on a sumptuous Chinese feast organized by an acquaintance we hit the Orensantz just in time for Joelle Leandre and India Cooke. Both women struck poses sharply contrary to any stiff string recital expectations. Leandre was full of vulgar whoops and hollers and Cooke joined her in tearing away voraciously at the tropes of their instrumentation. If anything the results were even more exciting than their recent duo disc on Red Toucan, and for those who’ve heard it, that’s hopefully saying something.

Another oddball ensemble followed with Matthew Shipp, William Parker and Sabir Mateen constituting three quarters of an all-star quarter. The fourth man? Han Bennink with “take no prisoners” game face steadfastly affixed. The set quickly hit a fever pitch and remained relentlessly in the red for pretty much the remainder. Bennink even exited stage left at one point to quickly exchange his sweat-drenched sailing shirt for a new one that was soon equally saturated. I suspect if I hadn’t had the weight of five sleepless nights on my skull, I’d have enjoyed it more, but Bennink’s incessant bashing coupled with Mateen’s merciless false register squealing quickly took its toll and I soon found myself tuning in and out to the din. Shipp and Parker played well, but they were largely drowned out by the white noise deluge.

Next up Rob Brown presented another multi-media collaboration of visuals, dancers and musicians. I found it better than the set a few nights prior, but still had a bit of trouble with the sometimes rickety fit between the constituent parts. A short purely musical set by the trio of Brown, cellist Dan Levin and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi was an easier pill to swallow and well-stocked with seasoned interplay. Finally, as the clock hands neared 1:30am, Dennis Gonzalez’s Yells at Eels took the stage with Oliver Lake guesting on curved soprano and alto. Dennis seemed to sense the communal fatigue that hung as a heavy canopy over the remaining crowd and responded in kind with a short and highly accessible set and pieces dedicated to William Parker & Toshinori Kondo. Sons Stefan and Aaron, on drums and bass respectively, fixed on some muscular grooves beneath the horns spirited flights, but the sum seemed a bit like a sail at three-quarters mast. Still it was great to see Dennis again and have the opportunity to catch up with him however brief. As I type this the trio is touring Portugal and I’m excited to hear about their adventures upon a return stateside via the always welcoming Gonzalez thread over at JC. An early morning cab-ride back to Brooklyn accompanied by the mellifluous strains of vintage Negro string band music served as icing to the evening.

So that’s Vision X in a highly personalized nutshell. My body may not have the necessary backbone to shoulder the tonnage of the daunting schedule these days, but there are plenty of fresh recruits who do. Numbers seemed a bit down this year compared to past fests and the economics of the venture aren’t improving by any stretch, but I’d lay odds that a Vision XX is a healthy prospect for ten years hence.

Three from Sedimental

Brendan Murray
Resting Places
Sedimental
039

David Gross
things I found to be true
Sedimental
040

EKG
No sign
Sedimental
041

The four tracks on Brendan Murray’s excellent disc take the drone as their starting point and build from the enjoyably workmanlike to the ecstatic sublime. The first two cuts, ‘Shore’ and ‘Garden (second mix)’, create dense hums, layered from high to low registers and dusted with noise, forming a very lush, throbbing hum wherein the various elements oscillate at different intervals, investing the ebb and flow with a biological feel. There tends to be a tonal element at the core, sometimes of an organ-y nature, which ably supports whatever ornament Murray chooses to add. ‘Garden’ includes some billowy sounds that envelop the central drones like columns of pressurized air to great effect. The only slight misgiving I have about these pieces is wondering if, having established a robust structural base, virtually anything added in wouldn’t tend to sound “good”. Probably not, but I find myself a little curious about the choices made, what was left in and what was deemed unsuitable. Whatever the case, the results are perfectly satisfying. Murray ups the ante significantly on the last two tracks, ‘Bed’ and ‘Tomb’. The former begins with muted, threatening rumbles circumscribed with a harsh hiss, soon interrupted by loud bells that trundle through the haze like the calls of some dystopian street merchant. This gradually winds down into a fascinating seesaw of blurred, perhaps highly iterated tones, reminiscent of the closing minutes of Lucier’s ‘I Am Sitting in a Room’ before ending with a powerful surge in volume, deluging the listener in sheets of noise. ‘Tomb’ almost takes that ending cataclysm as its starting point, venturing surprisingly close to the area encountered toward the end of the title cut from Glenn Branca’s classic, “Ascension” (though this is better), a sound world in a constant state of coruscating radiation, barely controlled. It’s very, very exciting music. These two fantastic pieces close out one of the best releases I’ve heard this year. Get it.

David Gross’ “Things I found to be true” is a selection of alto sax improvisations, shortish in duration (between about two and five minutes) and fairly confined to the quiet end of things, although with subtle variation in attacks. Unlike a good many new music listeners, I have nothing inherently against solo discs or performances (finding the oft-used derogation, “masturbatory” oddly Victorian in nature) but through much of this recording, I did find myself wanting to hear a foil for Gross, someone to comment on his ruminations. Somewhere, I suppose, there’s a line between conversing with oneself and releasing those conversations to the public and, too often, I didn’t hear any particular reason for this disc to be out there. For example, the opening track, ‘partially buried woodshed’, contains a run of breath tones, valve pops, flutters etc., all techniques however well executed (and, throughout, Gross is fine in this regard) we’ve heard many a time before and which, here, aren’t put to use in any kind of new conceptual framework that might otherwise cause one to sit up and take notice. At least to these ears. Too much a catalog of sounds a la early work by Mats Gustafsson or the recent release on Confront by Martin Kuchen. Well recorded and certainly possessing any number of sounds that are, in and of themselves, not un-juicy, but (and maybe I’m just missing it) I wanted to hear more in the way of ideas.

EKG is Kyle Bruckmann on oboe and English horn and Ernst Karel on trumpet, each also contributing substantial work on “analog electronics”. Seven improvisations, titularly scaling down from ‘Years’ to ‘Seconds’ (with no apparent effect on the content!), the music in some ways occupies a middle ground between the two releases previously discussed. There’s more than a little of a drone aspect to it but it’s far more broken up with gestural, acoustic sounds, albeit generally well disguised ones. These elements fall within range of the “standard” one hears in this area of music (not that there are all too many free oboists around): breath tones, harsh scrapes, key clicks and so on, but they’re deployed quite well, serving as salient points affixed to electronic scrims that tend toward the bleak, wind-eroded and metallic. The pieces gradually grow in depth and interest; both ‘Days’ and ‘Seconds’ contain compelling passages with a strong cinematic feel to them, the contrast between reed/brass and electronics well balanced within the rough and tumble. Motors churn, heads knock, wires sizzle. Each track maintains interest in a slightly different manner, each repays repeated listenings with newly perceived angles of attack. “No Sign” is a fine, solid recording.

Waylon Jennings - Waylon Live (RCA/BMG)

Waylon didn’t coin the outlaw attitude in country (that honor arguably belongs to Johnny Cash), but he certainly lived it and sold it to legions of fans. Whether with his single finger salute to the Nashville old boy’s network or his willingness to plunder the regions of rock, blues and pop for bricks in his personal sound, Waylon bucked tradition while still borrowing the best it had to offer. The “take it or leave it” aura also reflected in his stripped down band the Waylors- a tough as hardtack seven-piece of three guitars, pedal-steel, harmonica, bass and drums. No schmaltzy keyboards or strings allowed within sight of the stage. His personage likewise struck a purposeful pose. From the hand-tooled saddle leather carapace of his Telecaster to the high-collared rhinestone shirts, cowhide vests, dungarees and boots, to the shaggy Southern rock mane and beardstache, all crowned with the rich wounded drawl that was another cousin to Cash, Waylon emphasized wide open space over the confining weight of overproduction and artifice. Everything comes to boil on this seminal live smorgasbord from ’74, a body of music that’s ballooned to over four times its originally circulated size over the course of consecutive reissues. Dubbed The Expanded Edition, BMG’s 2003 version looks to be definitive: 42 cuts (22 previously unreleased) and well over two hours of material culled from a three show stint in Dallas and Austin. It’s more than enough for any self-respecting country fan to gorge his or her ears on several times over. From the crowd-coaxing cover of Jimmy Rogers’ “T for Texas” with a chugging freight train rhythm, stinging pedal steel from old pro Ralph Mooney and wailing blues harp by Roger Crabtree, to the sturdy sign off “You Can Have Her” the band jockeys that tight/loose continuum we here at Bags are so fond of debating. Other burners include “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” where Waylon captures the autarchic Americana spirit in a concentrated 3:23 receptacle, autographing the lyrics with some ripping twang-saturated runs and “Honky Tonk Heroes,” one of his hugest hits were he pays respects to the rowdy ways of the past masters. All are in the two to four minute range and their brisk pacing keeps things from lagging or faltering. Even tears-in-beer ballads like “Amanda” and “Mona” preserve a satisfying simplicity. It’s like a killer honky tonk jukebox made flesh with stimulants aplenty for the involuntary onset of White Man’s Overbite. Stacked beside Live at Fulsom Prison and Joe Ely’s Live Shots it ties as a tip-top trifecta soundtrack for any interstate road trip.

Go easy on dem eels

Along with about 30 other people packed into a small room above the Ethiopian restaurant Abyssinia in West Philly, last night I got to dig the hot freebop jams of Yells at Eels, Dennis Gonzalez' trio with his homegrown rhythm section of sons Aaron (doublebass) and Stefan (drumkit). The Texans are on a tour wrapping up its US segment with a hit at the Vision fest tomorrow (with guest Oliver Lake) and resuming next week in Portugal. While not advanced players, at a mere 24 and 19 years of age Aaron and Stefan are certainly advanced for their years, which is exactly what you'd expect with a singular maelstrom of artistic immersion like Dennis Gonzalez for a dad! They worked a fierce, elastic, and exuberant groove while Dennis nursed some relaxed tunes with his trademark style of melody informed by Mexican and Hispano-American music. I would've preferred to hear him take things further out in the solos, but there was some smoke coming off his horn and he blew it with the confidence to take some unexpected and satisfying phrasal detours. What really set the gig apart, though, was the playful, lighthearted vibe and Dennis' eminently endearing personality, which was enthusiastically welcomed by the rather atypical audience.

It was a refreshing context for a jazz gig, with only a half-dozen of us regulars on the creative jazz scene flanked by a decidedly tattoo-heavy assemblage of young people generally signifying themselves as a free-floating punk demographic. I didn't recognize any of them and it turns out the place is basically an established neighborhood hang and it was a matter of accidental good fortune that the Texans got such a fun-loving and receptive audience for their foray into Philly. I suppose that's the way live music culture usually works though, a touring band testing their wares on the locals who'd be hanging out at some bar or another regardless of whether any particular music was happening. While I can theoretically speculate it's some kind of social norm, it certainly is a change of pace from my usual universe of avant-garde music where the audience studiously selects certain musicians to bestow their attention upon based on comically refined aesthetic biases.

Therein lies the twist that makes the evening well worthy of Bags blogging. These good-spirited youth bearing no affiliation with jazz culture couldn't've been a better match for the Gonzalez clan. You see, Aaron and Stefan separately maintain a grindcore duo called Akkolyte that had its own gigs on the tour interspersed with Yells at Eels'. In fact, they brought a trace of their hardcore/grindcore energy to their dad's jazz, which was a welcome flavor to my ears. So somehow the locals got wind of the lads' dual-identity and invited them to do an impromptu Akkolyte set at a squatter-esque residence afterwards. Delighted by this opportunity to get the full Gonzalez experience, I joined many in the crowd who made their way over to the somewhat less savory nearby neighborhood and the house they'd dubbed "the drive-by house" in dry recognition of the many bullets that fly on the block.

(Curiously enough, that's Yanni Papadopoulos happily lounging in the background. He's the brilliant guitarist of Philadelphia's long-running jazz-metal group Stinking Lizaveta and an equally unlikely person as me to have been in these crusty environs.)

Aside from my early days as a metal aficionado, aggressive rock music has been a rather peripheral interest for me and I typically revel in the glories of Minor Threat, Snapcase, Napalm Death, etc as an occasional diversion to my vastly more consuming interests in avant-jazz, free improv, avant-prog, etc. I've never felt much kinship with the social culture of aggressive rock music, and it has been an extremely rare exception that I've subjected myself to its live performance and attendant excesses in volume, scuzzy vibe, etc. Thankfully Akkolyte had such a minimum of equipment to use in the cramped basement that playing too loud wasn't even an option, and I really enjoyed their prog- and jazz- informed blasts of grindcore. I will say, however, that while there are plenty of bass/drum duos for whom this bare bones instrumentation is fully sufficient (besides Ruins and Lightning Bolt I believe there are a number of hardcore/grindcore bands who pull this off), to my ears it sounded like they really needed another instrument to complete the musical package, guitar being the obvious choice, but in my fantasy world an accordion or Fender Rhodes would be even better.

It was a rather charming contrast I observed between the jazz gig and this 2:00am session in a basement (with an economical ceiling height of about six feet) packed with what are technically known as crusty punks (pictured below). As pleasant and refreshing as it was to rub elbows in this milieu, I wouldn't want to make a regular habit of witnessing live-action vomiting, drunken moshing, and incredibly uninspired drunken banter by kids generally around the border of the legal drinking age.

I offer my warmest salute to Dennis, Aaron, and Stefan and their open-minded creative lives, and I should note that Dennis cheerfully disabused me of my rather plausible theory that his sons were the very "eels" in "Dennis Gonzalez Yells at Eels". Alas, the phrase turns out to have a more prosaic origin.

~Michael Anton Parker

London Improvisers Orchestra - Responses, Reproduction and Reality

Emanem 4110

A good friend of mine once characterized the experience of listening to an improvising orchestra (and I think he was referring specifically to the European examples) as like running full speed through the Louvre – a significant amount of great art occurring at flashes barely comprehensible. This is certainly true of thematically irreverent ensembles like the ICP Orchestra and Willem Breuker Kollektif, as well as the kaleidoscopic Globe Unity outfit, and the more soloistically-inclined aggregates of Alan Silva and Manfred Schoof – but what happens when one stalls out in a room of color field paintings? For such a coloristic situation, there are a few large improvising orchestras for which stasis, not speed, is the key to sensory expansion.

Formed in 1997 as the result of an English project directed by trumpeter-composer-conductor Lawrence ‘Butch’ Morris, the London Improvisers’ Orchestra have remained active since that time as one of the few orchestras of its ilk to focus almost completely on free or conducted (though otherwise almost total) improvisation. At the core of the ensemble, the page reads like a who’s who of the eminent English improvising community: trumpeter Harry Beckett, trombonist Paul Rutherford, violinist Philip Wachsmann, reedmen Evan Parker and Lol Coxhill, bassist Simon H. Fell, drummer Louis Moholo, multi-instrumentalists Terry Day and Steve Beresford, and guitar-sculptor Keith Rowe all participate in the LIO. Responses, Reproduction and Reality (Emanem), spread across two performances at London’s yearly Freedom of the City Festival (2003 and 2004) and featuring thirty-eight improvisers, is larger than anything LIO's contemporaries have put together. Yet despite the presence of a core of improvisers, there is not what one could call a ‘base’ around which the music occurs – say, a singular rhythm section and a few reedmen that rise to the occasion without fail. Rather, one can only speak of a constancy of expanding and contracting fields of activity, an increasing hum of movement and sound interaction that yields an orchestral personality if not a central nervous system. It is somewhat surprising that Louis Moholo – the renowned South African drummer who propelled the Brotherhood of Breath and even kept Kees Hazevoet and Peter Brötzmann in line – does not make use of his characteristic cross-rhythms to give the orchestra a jubilant ‘swing,’ choosing to play in an almost completely textural fashion along with other percussionists (save his underpinning of John Butcher on “Ism”). With only a single complete improvisation in the set, the remainder of the album is conducted by members of the orchestra, in the sense that the pregnant gestures of the conductor are directly in response to the dynamics and direction of the improvisation for as masses push outward, they are themselves pushed onto other branches. Yet among the gestures and trills, the organism maintains singularity, and those moments that stick out from the proceedings – the aforementioned Butcher tenor solo or Beresford and Veryan Weston’s piano filigree on altoist Caroline Kraabel’s conduction “Hearing Reproduction 5,” providing the weight of an orchestra to Jaap Blonk’s vocal sputtering, Rutherford’s solo entrée to the set – are beautifully bandaged thumbs for obvious reasons, providing necessary daubs among layer after layer of rolled-on paint.

As a conduit for masses of sound moving in groups from two to thirty, the London Improvisers Orchestra is a necessary and important vessel and a world apart from the sensory overload that has graced many a free orchestra. In a sense, however, there isn’t enough overload in these proceedings to make them stick in one’s craw – what separates a Clyfford Still from a Mark Rothko, a conduit from the material itself.

A Night Out

Despite the fact that I’m ridiculously busy, I would have felt awful had I not made it to at least a night or two of the Vision Festival. This year’s lineup is strong, too; when I got the schedule in the mail, I ran my highlighter pen through performances on four nights that I thought would be well worth seeing/hearing. Then I signed up for night classes, to learn audio engineering, and wound up only able to attend on Wednesday night, June 15. I’d planned to hit Thursday’s show as well, but stuff got in the way.

So, last night I caught the first three performances. The show opened with poet Steve Dalachinsky reading to musical accompaniment. Said accompaniment was supposed to be Matt Shipp on piano, but he didn’t turn up, so instead it was violinist Mat Maneri and a guitarist whose name I didn’t catch. Steve’s a really nice guy, a good writer and a good friend, but live poetry was no substitute for the dinner I hadn’t yet eaten. So I wandered down the block to Subway and came back for the next performance.

This was the fourth time I’d seen Charles Gayle, but the first time I’d seen him play alto sax. I’d seen a tenor-drums show at the Cooler a half-dozen years ago or more, with Borbetomagus; another tenor-drums set at an earlier Vision Festival; and a solo piano gig at Tonic in 2002 or thereabouts. This performance was the best of the four, with the Cooler show right behind.

Gayle’s set was a perfect example of how the player is as important as the instrument. I’ve never heard an alto sax sound quite the way it did in his hands. Between the high-end screams and the bubbling roars from the bottom of the horn’s range, he found notes I wasn’t aware existed. More importantly, to my ears anyway, the trio was swinging pretty hard throughout. In the liner notes to Gayle’s recent disc Shout! (Clean Feed), he’s quoted as saying, “By constantly playing energy music, I found myself becoming a victim of the music, and, ironically, even less free.” Here, he was supported by bassist Hillard Greene and drummer Jay Rosen, each of whom had quite a bit to contribute. Greene took a couple of excellent solos, bowing furiously and releasing low, throbbing tones that earned appreciative hoots ‘n’ hollers from the audience. Rosen was a little too cymbal-happy, but when he wasn’t crashing away like Alex Van Halen, he was keeping excellent time, following Gayle’s hand signals and spoken instructions and bringing the improvised pieces to satisfying, never-haphazard conclusions. At two different points, Gayle moved from sax to piano; on the latter occasion, he played alto with one hand, scourging the keyboard with brutal block chords from the other. But it was the long passages when he stood at center stage in his porkpie hat and almost too-tight suit jacket, shredding the air with long rippling screams, that were the main attraction. The set never lost momentum, and it didn’t run too long, as improvised performances of all genres frequently do. It was a concentrated, measured dose of free jazz power, exactly what I’d been hoping to hear.

He was followed by Roy Campbell’s Pyramid Trio, featuring William Parker on bass and Hamid Drake on drums. They were playing to dance accompaniment from Patricia Nicholson, and a slide show, neither of which were super-appealing propositions to me, at first. But it turned out to work very well, in large part because the rhythm section built such a powerful trance groove that I’m surprised more people weren’t dancing. Campbell, as he’s wont to do, played everything he had with him, starting on flugelhorn before moving to flute, cornet, and finally trumpet. The extended piece the trio performed wasn’t totally improvised; Campbell and Parker were working from sheet music at the start, before disappearing entirely into the collective energy. And the dancing worked better than I thought it would. The slides were fine, some nice landscapes or whatever. Roy Campbell’s shirt had brighter colors than the backdrop, though.

I always meet someone interesting at the VF. This year, it was the two guys who run Clean Feed – they were helping sell merch upstairs, and had a whole tablefull of their releases. I talked one of them, Pedro, into giving me copies of Shout! and two Whit Dickey albums, Coalescence with Roy Campbell, Joe Morris (on bass) and Rob Brown and In A Heartbeat with those three, plus Chris Lightcap on bass (thus freeing Morris to play guitar). Review on the latter two sometime soon.

I wish I could have seen Fred Anderson play. He’s probably onstage with Joseph Jarman, Tatsu Aoki and Alvin Fielder as I type these words. The whole festival is dedicated to him, and he’s doing a second set around 11 PM with Kidd Jordan, William Parker and Hamid Drake. Since I’ve listened to 2 Days In April about a hundred times since first getting it several years ago, that’s a show I really wish I could be there for. Oh, well. Maybe next year I’ll have a few more free evenings.

we're this many (II)

Our two year anniversary was actually back in March, but June of 2003 found this site functioning somewhat steadily with continuous content. This improvisational journal continues to roll steady, with a touch of chaos, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

One thing missing of late is the voice of our now behind-the-scenes tech and editor, Joe Milazzo. Here's hoping that he'll return soon enough. I know many agree with me that his contributions here have been at once some of the most entertaining and challenging work to grace our pages. Joe's work is never of the controversial brand, at least in the sense that readers conspire against one another in brawls of opinion. That's why you don't see too many comments spilling off of his authored pages. If you're like me, you relish in the decoding of his pieces on a L'innomable recording or the Once Festival, and at the same time are intimidated by their magnitude. He's also capable of heartfelt concision, as with the tribute to his lost father in a simple note on an Ink Spots compliation.

We have some new voices aboard as noted in an entry or two below, and whose words can be read in recent feature articles and a review of the latest in the ErstLive series. Mike and Richard's perspectives are as refreshing as Marc Medwin's, and I'm certain the range of personality they bring to this site won't be lost on anyone. I should add that Derek's new (forced) management position has been paramount to the life of the site over the last few months. If you see him at a festival this year, give him a noogie and tease him. A lot. He'd rather write any day of the week.

I plan to add a new area to the site in the coming months, focusing on DVD and film commentary. I've been in contact with some distributors and the possibilities look promising. If you have any interest and experience with this area of writing, please inquire within.

Lastly, hats and glasses tipped to a strong two years. Cheers and blessings to those of you who were kind enough to contribute through the little "alms" link (over there, on the right) last year. I always want this site to be free of advertising and your donations have allowed that.

Derek Bailey & Evan Parker - The London Concert

Psi 05.01

Few rifts in improvised music have been as lasting as that between Evan Parker and Derek Bailey. The reality that the catalyst of mutual estrangement is decades past raises doubts as to whether either man even remembers its particulars. Their row may have robbed listeners of recent meetings, but consolation lies in several concerts the duo recorded before their split. As Parker succinctly puts it in the notes to The London Concert: “when I resigned as a director of Incus Records in 1987, I took with me the tapes and the rights in all my recordings for that label. Since we had recorded two duo albums, we agreed to take one each.”

Martin Davidson’s notes expertly toe the line of neutrality, describing the summary details of the London event in dry, poker-faced prose that leaves his loyalties to both camps unscathed. Parker plays soprano for the first half, tenor for the second. Bailey sticks predominantly to a two-speaker stereo guitar set up enhanced by his customary volume pedals. The exception arises in his solo section of the second half where he straps on a custom-built 19-string acoustic, a spindly contraption that sounds like a fork-tined zither.

Recording clarity remains quite clean and close for much of the duration with Bailey’s shimmering tonal icicles well-preserved alongside Parker’s striated lineaments. Bailey’s ability to shape sound collages that are at once brusque and spiny and yet oddly lyrical fits with his partners’ similarly penetrating temperament. Parker isn’t one to mince notes or tones either. His sharply suspirating soprano sorties draw blood just as easily as Bailey’s taloned plectrum. Tenor proves just as petulant. Parker voices percussive reed stutters and trills that match the unstable angularity of Bailey’s own fervently-percolating patterns.

Playing it straight or orthodox simply isn’t a viable option, though the Parker’s elongated tones toward the middle of the segment marked “Part I” hint at the outlines of parabolic melody. Bailey answers with ricocheting echoes that whir with the voltage of livewire electricity. The brittle fracas reaches an apex as the pair burrow into the figurative innards of their respective implements, Parker breathing acidic recycling gusts and Bailey abrading his strings and frets with hard-pecking gesticulations. Parker’s supreme level of embouchure control is often such that slaps to the forehead in awed disbelief are frequent. His “Second Half” solo salvo deploys with enough force to punch pneumatic holes in the ceiling tiles of Wigmore Hall and leaves the impression that attendees were brushing heavy layers of plaster dust off their pates by the end of the performance.

Despite the hard-won congruence of their respective vernaculars, it’s also evident that interpersonal tension was cardinal tinder for the creative spark. There’s deep listening going on, but neither man seems willing to cede too much of in the way of sympathetic niceties. And so they barrel forward together, tumbling and tangling in a tandem that remains engrossing from start to finish even as it eschews easy exposition.

Also of note in the all too finite Bailey-Parker folio is Arch Duo, a Berkeley studio date taped in October of 1980 that is a notch below this one, but still stocked with plenty of bracing tête-à-tête. I haven’t yet heard Compatibles, the Incus duo recording in Bailey’s possession taped ten years after its sibling. If it’s even close to on par with this earlier outing I’m putting it onto my shortlist of “must procures.”

~ Derek Taylor

Robert Fripp and Brian Eno - The Equatorial Stars (Opal / DGM)

Fripp and Eno’s first joint full-length in some thirty years drags along with it the noiseless chain of history and anticipation that threatens to keep it from even a first breath. While the disc is definitely a retread of now-hallowed ambient ground, sheer sonic depth and tempting textural play lift it just above the mythological nightmare of its own making.

Largely due to a resurgence in popularity of all things droney -- thanks to Fripp and Eno’s work with Matching Mole, which got the ball rolling in 1972 -- parts of Stars even exhibit a degree of fashion sense. “Meissa” opens with the staccato stutterings of what sounds like Eno-tweaked guitar, an advance in the Frippertronics camp bespeaking at least a wink in the direction of recent technological developments. The odd beat even shows its face, best integrated on “Lupus” yet sounding most pedestrian -- not so much offensive as simply outdated and plainly tasteful -- in “Altair”. In fact, “Meissa” might be viewed as the template from which almost every track on offer here is struck. As has been this duo’s wont, long loops swell, fade and then disappear. The overriding atmosphere is one of bliss, static and serene, and anyone familiar with Evening Star knows the formula. Such floatiness does not preclude a few moments of stock sinisterity, as in the first few moments of “Lupus”, and at the right volume, these are fairly effective.

What saves the disc from itself, and what I found most refreshing, are Fripp’s contributions. Occasionally, the worn-out synth patches I’ve come to dread with the audition of each new Crimson album rear their ugly heads, but by and large, we are treated to some beautifully textured improvisations, full of the gorgeous sustains and controlled feedback any Fripp fan has loved for so long. Much of Evening Star’s distortion has gone, or been somehow subsumed, but the playing is even more mature, each note bent, quivering or arrow-straight, fitting perfectly in its surroundings as if it had sprung up and grown tall just there. The disc ends with one of the longest and slowest fades I’ve ever heard, and this might be the most astonishing revelation from a disc that gets better with each spin.

~ Marc Medwin

Keith Rowe / Sachiko M / Toshimaru Nakamura / Otomo Yoshihide - ErstLive 005

ErstLive 005 is a 3CD set documenting a four hour performance from Erstwhile Records’ AMPLIFY festival in Berlin, 2004. Beyond the obvious challenges facing four musicians focused on one delicate detailed performance for such an extended length of time, this awesome release also challenges the listener who is used to absorbing music in hour-long chunks at a time.

Comparisons have been drawn between this set and other long-form releases such as Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No.2, or the lengthier works of LaMonte Young, but for me these comparisons are relatively meaningless. Listening right through to Feldman’s SQ2 is a test of endurance. The challenge lies with remaining focused on music that changes very little over its lengthy duration. That need for endurance is perhaps more evident with Young, where listeners almost have to transcend the music to reach an elevated state of concentration to make it through the work. This is not the case with the ErstLive quartet. The music constantly evolves across the three discs, pulling itself apart and rebuilding itself.

The challenge for the listener, then, is to try and make sense of the work as a whole, pulling together nearly four hours of abstract audio collage into one meaningful experience.

The three discs have been divided into four ‘tracks’ for listener convenience rather than any deliberate attempt at delineation between segments of the music. While convenient, I found it most effective and rewarding to listen in one long sitting.

Surprisingly, this recording documents only the second meeting of these four musicians, the first just a week earlier in Cologne. However, all four musicians know each other’s work very well, all having played together to varying degrees in the past.

There are no surprises with the ‘instrumentation’ played: Rowe’s familiar tabletop guitar, Sachiko’s manipulated sinewaves from an empty sampler, Nakamura’s gently caressed mixing board feedback and Otomo focused primarily on his turntable (although his guitar makes a brief appearance at the start of the first disc). If the guitar appears again across the recording it passed by my noticing. The music inhabits a restricted colour palette of grainy, finely textured and highly detailed sounds, punctuated occasionally by the glistening sheer lines of Sachiko’s sinewaves and the unpredictable extremes of Nakamura’s feedback.

There is an austerity across all three discs driven by an economy of means. With the exception of ten minutes of cut-and-thrust interplay at the start of disc two there is little reference made to the traditional conventions of improvisation. Even Keith Rowe’s radio is kept in check, appearing often on the first two discs but only in short bursts, not allowing the cultural baggage of other people’s music to creep too far into the proceedings. Although I swear half a verse of “I Will Survive” can be heard buried in clouds of feedback seventeen minutes into disc two; subtle irony at a point not even halfway through a four hour recording session!

This is a much more organic, naturally flowing recording than the sharp edges of the three Japanese musician’s previous recordings for Erstwhile, Good Morning, Good Night. ErstLive 005 is allowed to progress and develop without any agreed structure or rules. The pressures of time usually placed on musicians are removed here, allowing the music to decide its own direction.

Interestingly, in recent years three of the musicians here – Rowe, Sachiko and Nakamura – have taken a particular role in many of the projects they have contributed to, often sitting nearer the back of the mix creating clouds of sound, either drones or slowly developing sheets of resonance for their collaborators to carve into or scribble all over. This is very much the role that Rowe assumed in the latter years of AMM, and Sachiko and Nakamura have often lent themselves more to a slowly developing layered sound in group situations.

Whilst during the four hours here all of the three above musicians do take up positions at the fore, making statements that often lead the music off into new areas, they also do spend long periods of time shaping blankets of finely detailed sound into which Otomo then places wonderful moments of carefully chosen abstractions. This situation brings to mind images of the master calligrapher creating beautiful forms with the most minimal swoops of his brush, but in this case taking a fully realised Rothko as his starting canvas...

So the challenge remains with taking four hours of these beautifully arranged moments and taking something from them as a whole. What definitely exists within these recordings is a sense of a journey, four fantastic musicians attempting to move together to one place within the music.

Despite the familiarity that exists between the musicians there is a sense of them coming even closer together over the three discs. About fifteen minutes into disc three the quartet seems to take the music to an almost spiritual level. Unnecessary elements to the music fall away as if some sort of Buddhist awakening has been achieved between the four participants. While there are lengthy pauses in activity scattered right through the recordings, the last disc exudes a serene calmness, the result of this refinement of what was already a very close common language between the four musicians.

The rough and tumble interplay that appears in places earlier in the recording – particularly at the beginning of disc two – is left behind and the quartet pools their considerable resources into one stunningly beautiful whole. All contributions are pared down to the bare minimum required; each chosen sound is perfect. The music at this point is all-encompassing and powerfully involving.

One of the criticisms often levelled at this type of music is its supposed harshness and coldness, making it difficult for a listener to connect with it at an emotional level. This is not the case here. If you are willing to follow the music through to this point, something very powerful begins to happen during disc three. The whole recording is a journey, from the tentative careful openings to the relative turmoil of the middle disc, to the intense, yet calming plateau of disc three. Towards the end of my third or fourth listen my involvement with this music became so intense I almost forgot to breathe... this is a very special recording.

An awesome achievement from four very talented musicians and another jewel in the crown of Erstwhile Records. How they are going to top this one I have no idea.

~Richard Pinnell

Jon Easton with Don Messina and Bill Chattin

Jon Easton with Don Messina and Bill Chattin
Cadence CJR 1175

Pianist Jon Easton is a former student of Lennie Tristano and Sal Mosca, and keeps within the stylistic parameters set out by his mentors. Yet this is such an underexplored and vital tradition in jazz that the results still sound fresh. Evan Parker once remarked at a solo concert that his improvisations were in a sense “all part of the same music”: there’s a similar sense in Easton’s music of dipping into a deeper well, or resuming an ongoing conversation, as he revisits perennial Tristano-school touchstones like “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” “Foolin’ Myself” and “Out of Nowhere” – tunes he’s surely played hundreds of times. This is a music where it is hardly metaphorical to refer to the improvisation as containing “lines.” When Easton goes off on a tangent it is literally that: a straight line extrapolated from the curves of the basic chord changes, pursued to the point where it completely overshoots the tune’s structure and the accompaniment. At other points (“What Is This Thing Called Love” and “All of Me”) he spins out lines in the bass that weave so closely through the changes – like a tailor’s needle darting in and out – that it’s as if they’re a celebration of the tune, or perhaps of the sheer exhilirating fact of improvisation. Sometimes – surely unconsciously? – the music reveals unexpected affinities to an entirely different jazz tradition: the emphatic, spartan, virtually themeless lines of Easton’s improvisations at times verge on Andrew Hill territory, while Messina’s superbly volatile bass solos recall Scott LaFaro or even Richard Davis (a good example being his spot on “Dreams”). And what is the Tristanoite determination to let phrases find their own shape and continuation, in despite of the surrounding harmony and metre, if not a species of harmolodics?

It looks like this is something of a banner year for Tristanophiles: Sal Mosca has after long absence from the scene due to illness just released Thing-Ah-Majig (Zinnia), a trio album also with the Messina/Chattin rhythm section. I found that a profoundly moving disc, saturated in Mosca’s sense of mortality and his memories of all the music he’s played and listened to over the years. Easton’s disc inevitably doesn’t have such resonance or originality, but it’s a lovely example of the continuing virtues of this school of piano – if you’re looking for an antidote to the shopworn variations on bebop, Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock that pass for mainstream jazz piano nowadays, it’s an excellent place to start.

Trash Aesthetics

An idiotic idea, a stunt, or a piece of brilliance? What do the Bags denizens think? From the Fargone Records website, a notice from Ed Howard:

Trash Aesthetic is a new label with a very unique and egalitarian method of distributing music. TAR will release, in editions of 2-3 copies each, ANY material we receive. Of these copies, 1 will be given to the artist, and the other 1 or 2 will be sold through the label. The idea of Trash Aesthetic, in part, is to totally short-circuit the collector impulse in experimental music, and to encourage true experimentation on the part of the listener. Many artists featured on Trash Aesthetic will be unknown and possibly unreleased elsewhere, and the idea of this label is to provide a forum for these musicians to make a one-on-one connection with a listener. The affordable price of TAR releases will hopefully encourage some chance-taking from listeners, exploring previously unheard sounds in the form of a totally unique art object. All TAR releases are $4, or $18 for any 5. (Customers not in the US, add a dollar per title, or $4 for 5 titles.) Those interested should e-mail me a list of titles (and preferably alternates as well, due to the extremely limited nature of these titles) before placing a payment via PayPal, check, or money order. No one may order more than 5 titles at a time.

I'm sure if it was Tom Djll or Joe Milazzo writing this entry there'd be another couple of paragraphs on "the collector impulse" & why you might want to circumvent it..... -- I'm inclined to think that really the discs aren't "art objects" at all--the "art" is really in the gesture (the whole idea of the label), which is probably far more interesting than the actual CDs. Which is to say that I'm just happy knowing this project is out there; & that if I ordered any of these discs it'd be more as a memento of the project--"yes, someone really dreamed up this beautifully harebrained idea, here's proof!"--than for themselves as art objects or as musical documents.

Bags Bloodline Infusion

Time was when we had an “About” page here at Bags, a place were biographical blurbs & faux photos of the bullpen hung as explanatory fodder for curious passerby. That section still exists somewhere in the cyber-ether, but cobwebs & mildew now festoon its content & any formal links on the homepage have long been severed. The upshot is that it’s not always clear who’s in the authorship orbit and who’s since spun off into the void (Ground Control to Major Crawjo…).

Two newish conscripts definitely deserve commendation (as well as remuneration, if only it weren’t beyond the reach of Bags’ perpetually-penurious coffers). Michael Anton Parker is a familiar face by now, firing off penetrating dispatches like the exceptional one directly below from secluded digs on his rustic Pennsylvania spread (Milazzo just might have an heir apparent, IMO).

Occupying an address in my neck of the woods (though perhaps for not much longer?), Clifford Allen made his auspicious debut over this past weekend with the engrossing interview at the right and a doubleshot of disc reviews. Readers will likely recognize his byline from his prolific posts over at Paris Transatlantic and All About Jazz. The man knows his ESP-era free jazz backwards & forwards, Ayler to Zito, and is a master at nestling invaluable anecdotal kernels within his own insightful prose.

Please join me in raising a tumbler in hoary toast to them both.

In other news: Emory’s still an unseen behind-the-scenester, but I have high hopes that the rubber Perry White mask that’s been his preferred method of disguise will come off before summer’s wane.

Two from Moserobie

Ståhls Blå Schlachtplatte Moserobie MMPCD 024		Jonas Kullhammar Quartet with Norrbotten Big Band Snake City North Moserobie MMPCD 031

http://www.moserobie.com/

Publicity for the Bad Plus dubs them “the loudest piano trio ever.” Somehow “the loudest vibraphone/sax quartet ever” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, but that does give you some idea of the intensity of Schlachtplatte. There are echoes of the 1960s avant-Blue Note sound, but the sensibility is unmistakably contemporary – a controlled sensory overload, set to a compulsive groove built out of whizzing, precisely assembled cut-ups in a manner suggesting drum machines and looped samples. Bassist Filip Auguston and drummer Thomas Strønen are a perpetual one-two punch of a rhythm section (the demented pogo-stick drumming on “Harads” has to be heard to be believed), and saxophonists Joakim Milder and Håkon Kornstad play with a near-hysteria that finds room both for ferocity and touches of drollness. Vibraphonist/leader Mattias Ståhl is a quicksilver presence: as so often with post-Bobby Hutcherson vibes-playing, the vibes ripple over or under or to the side of the music, like a ghost in the machine.

Jonas Kullhammar’s Snake City North is a similarly energetic, knock-you-out album; indeed, the liner notes include the saxophonist’s exhortation to “play it loud (godammit...).” (OK, OK, I will!) Kullhammar has recorded most of the tunes on the disc before, but this time pianist Torbjörn Gulz has expanded them into handsome charts for Sweden ’s crack Norrbotten Big Band. The leader is a forceful player, though his fluent momentum cuts through the dense musical thickets without a sense of encountering much resistance. There’s nothing especially startling or idiosyncratic about the music: it offers eloquent hard bop variations, updates on the blues, 1960s “Sidewinder”-style funk, a joky “Bebopalulia.” But it’s still beautifully done, with a welcome sense of fun, and the results are a feast for big-band lovers. If you want something with an edge, though, Schlachtplatte is the disc to plump for.

~ Nate Dorward

Ruth Barberan / Margarida Garcia / Alfredo Costa Monteiro / Ferran Fages - Octante

Ruth Barberan / Margarida Garcia / Alfredo Costa Monteiro / Ferran Fages
Octante
L’Innomable

The last few years have seen a fairly large number of releases from the Iberian crew, generally of very high quality. It’s getting to the point where, if one is so inclined, it’s perhaps becoming possible to talk in terms of “progress” or, at least, change in the music that makes it to disc. This may or may not be meaningful, ultimately, as aspects like development might be absolutely beside the point, but there seems to be at least a little bit that’s discernable on that front with the last few recordings that have come my way.

Most significant is the apparent spiraling away from quiet improv toward a fuller, richer and certainly louder exposition. While these musicians (and the four represented here are inarguably central to this scene) have always had something of a sand-in-the-plumbing feel to their work, an earthy, even grimy character that’s been one of their most appealing attributes, it’s brought to the fore on ‘Octante’. The music seesaws between areas where the acoustic instruments hold sway and those where (presumably) Fages’ mixing board and whatnot erupt into Lehn-worthy paroxysms of squeal ‘n’ splat. Three tracks, 22, 6 and 14 minutes long, the first quickly splitting seams, ratcheting into action like some steam-powered machine that hasn’t seen oil in several decades, nosing through ill-lit corridors, emitting sensory blips to gauge distances. Barberan and Costa Monteiro engage in some wonderful byplay, their texturally different breath tones forming an enticing fabric, Garcia’s bowed rumblings beneath, Fages piercing through. The lulls still appear though they’re briefer, the space they occupy more cramped. There’s a decided tendency toward the harsh.

The relatively brief second track mixes bowed bass and trumpet that lend oddly alpenhorn-ish qualities with nervous patters and crinkles; less brash than the other two cuts but still pleasantly unsettling. The final piece opens in roughly similar territory—rather soft, metallic washes of tone—before a momentary descent into a bleak bed of static-infused subsonics. In olden times (well, by release standards anyway—this was recorded in July, 2003), a stasis may have been reached at this point, the careful activity allowed to simmer for quite a while before the flame was turned off. Not now. The fuel is stoked and the flames start licking skyward. There are times when I’m reminded of a more intense, hyper-amplified variation on Xenakis’ classic Concret PH, as pings and whangs ricochet across an increasingly confined space. It ends with a hellified, grating whine.

‘Octante’ is yet another fine, fine disc from a bunch of musicians who have yet to encounter any discernable limit. For listeners already into their earlier work, it’s a no-brainer. I’d be interested to hear the reactions to this from the No Fun crowd, especially if they’ve no previously heard from this neck of the woods, as some of the work contained here abuts their grounds. Good stuff.

~ Brian Olewnick

Rasp and Roll

Cassettes. Audio cassettes. Analog audio cassettes. Analog audio cassette tapes. Rectangular thingies with two holes and little plastic teeth. A thin, long, flat thing spooled snugly inside a hollow shell. Type I. Type II. Normal Bias. High bias. C60. C90. Dolby. You now have zero guesses of what I'm talking about.

It's been about twenty years since the compact disc was introduced and about half as long since cassettes became relatively obsolete like vinyl. It was a slow death and the purpose of my remarks today is to gather some casual observations of coursing life blood in this medium in the happy wake of an unusually cassette-centric evening of music at Tonic on Wednesday. Cassettes were cheap in their heyday and now free if you're willing to go "shopping" on garbage day. Cassettes were recordable and rerecordable. Players and recorders were cheap and available in all manner of ergonomic permutations. All this is very important, but I'm starting to come to grips with the lesson of Howard Stelzer—"Howie" as is often preferred—about what's really most important about cassettes: the fact they work by motors making some whimsical feat of yesteryear's electrical engineers roll round and round, innocently, unsuspectingly, mechanically, semi-faithfully.

I don't want to belabor the obvious unnecessarily, but perhaps it's not so unnecessary and the medium-subversion I'm reflecting on here has simply become an ordinary fixture on my musical landscape, much like balloons or daxophones, while remaining exotic and baffling to most others. Howie's self-effacing and understated career as a cassette improvisor has gradually infiltrated my listening lifestyle to the point of remarkable prominence, and when I think of the recordings and performances that have had the strongest impact on me over the past two years or so, Howie and his quaint tabletop assemblage figure in an almost implausibly high percentage of them between the BSC, his solo performances, and other delights. It's time for me to outright acknowledge that there's virtually not been a sound coming from his corner that hasn't had me on the edge of my seat with a feeling of joyous discovery.

For the benefit of anyone who lacks enough context for my babbling, let me briefly describe the craft of Howie Stelzer. Howie is a mild-mannered young savant of radical sound residing in the Northeast region of the US, the kind of fellow who started listening to weird music at a much younger age than most. He runs a record label and distributorship and so on. He's quite tangled up in some musical subculture I can't claim anything more than a dilettantish awareness of. Since some point in the 90s he has performed music using a modest setup of a small mixer, a few yardsale-grade portable cassette players, a smattering of cassettes, and probably a few other minor devices. Let me state from the outset that I haven't a clue what's actually on these cassettes, and this is a mystery of content that nags at me, but which I somehow always neglect to inquire about, perhaps because I secretly entertain a romantic notion that their content is irrelevant and his music is derived from some low-tech wizardry that leaves the source material behind in some quantum leap of abstraction. (Note to self: find out what's on the damn tapes.) So he moves the knobs on his mixer and presses buttons on the cassette players and moves them around so their little built-in speakers approach microphones and that sort of thing. And out come these amazing sounds, often like the familiar sound of simultaneous fast-forward and playback, but I can no longer speak of this with a singular noun because he has revealed a vast universe of subtle differentiation in slurs, to say nothing of crackles and rasps. They are the sounds of crudely accelerated playback. More generally, Howie has perceptually exploded the sounds of gently mistreated magnetic tape technology; he is the quintessential deconstructionist of this medium and the counterpart of Marclay, Tétreault, Van Bebber, Otomo, et al in the vinyl medium.

On Wednesday Howie performed at Tonic in duo with Sawako, a mononymic electronicist I'd never heard of before, though as it were I live in blissful ignorance of most happenings involving digital sound production. The joyous occasion of a Stelzer jaunt to my listening proximity was a tour with Bernhard Gal, who concluded the evening with a solo set of skillful laptop music. The evening commenced with a solo set by Aki Onda, who uses cassettes as saliently as Howie, and I'll elaborate on that set below for the sake of setting Howie's work off in dramatic relief. But it's the equally vivid contrast with Sawako that I'll first turn my attention to.

The duo set was a smashing success. I was ecstatic. In fact, it was almost as good as a Stelzer solo set. A bit of the space and tension of Howie's music was reduced by Sawako's episodic interjections of quiet and subtle electronic sound via a handheld digital sampler she earnestly manned in her lap. Her first episode was a gentle, dreamy layer of sheer soft static textural melodic bliss along the lines of the IDM-as-new-age aesthetic of Nobukazu Takemura and associates, and I was very sad to hear it end after only a minute or so. I would've happily listened to that sample nursed and minimally developed for hours, and I've heard enough of Howie's music to know his profound instrumental flexibility would accomodate such a piece splendidly. Oh well. The rest of the set had a similar macrostructural profile as Sawako delivered a sequence of unrelated samples revealing an unfocused vocabulary in the generic/miscellaneous laptop electronica vein and a meager facility for real-time microstructural variation and development at the phrasal level. In contrast, Howie sculpted every gesture with the real-time control of an ace saxophonist.

It was a study in digital/analog contrast. While there was nothing inappropriate or problematically monotonous about Sawako's use of repetition at the subphrasal level, I consistently observed the strict rhythmic regularity typical of digitally-generated music, whereas Howie's rhythms unfolded with a biological wooziness that suits me fabulously as a biological sound-processor. It's those imperfections of motors, gears, microphones, and speakers, not to mention Howie's fingers. I don't mean this as some kind of rigid generalization about rhythm, because magical things can result from quantized repetition, like an escape from the experience of musical time in phrasal packets, offered in some of the brilliant work curated by labels like Mille Plateaux and 12k. But what I often hear in Howie's slurs and mechanical loops is the ecstatic metrical irregularity of the voice, a note stretching ever so slightly, breathing. To hear this in such a timbrally inscrutable vehicle as Howie's greyish sound world and to hear it subjected to the jarring, clipped attacks and decays of his primitive walkman/mixer tools is the germ of an explanation for the profound and revelatory experiences I seem to be consistently deriving from his work.

Fairly early in their first piece the music failed me for a minute or so when Sawako created a dynamic imbalance between the two sound layers. That this was an isolated occurrence in this set is a tribute to her admirable dynamic sensitivity in general, but it was a classic example of the ubiquitous scenario in which electronic sounds cut through the mix and step all over delicate acoustic or electroacoustic sounds. It's something I've experienced dozens of times with great frustration at the electronicist's relative obliviousness to the psychoacoustic context of the performance. I often wonder if it's because they are so used to loud music that when a situation calls for low volumes, they fail to distinguish between soft and very soft, precluding sonic mergers that could otherwise materialize. Or perhaps they are so embroiled in the awkward, sprawling interfaces between their hands and their sound palette that they're not really listening to their partners with any measure of detail.

An example of this kind of dynamic travesty that sticks out as an especially sore memory was the quartet of Jack Wright, Ricardo Arias, Barry Weisblat, and Matthew Ostrowski at the 2004 edition of Brooklyn's Improvised and Otherwise festival. I say "sore" because of the sheer potential of this lineup to create something new and mind-boggling, especially with two of my biggest heroes, Wright and Arias, playing two of my favorite instruments, saxophones and balloons, respectively. Happening on the third day, it was the main reason I actually stuck around for the whole festival instead of going home after the BSC performance on the first day, my overriding reason for even making a trip into the city. In my unfinished (and hence unpublished—sorry, I'm just lazy) review of the festival, I noted "It was a textbook case of acoustic vs electronic improvisation, and the acoustic performers lost. Matthew Ostrowski and Barry Weisblat ran their machines at a medium volume when a lower volume was called for, with a musicality that seemed limited to solo performance, as there was no evidence they understood how their sounds functioned in the acoustic space relative to the ensemble." It was actually a very good set and left me with a net positive impression of the two electronicists, but there's such an abundance of better-than-great music in the world that very good is simply not good enough for my purposes and one conspicuous flaw is enough to ruin an experience. As an antidotal anecdote, I can cite the fabulous and perfectly balanced duo I saw the other year between Seen Meehan and Toshimaru Nakamura. I think every electronic musician should study Nakamura's work in a live setting if they have an opportunity and take him as a role model.

The gulf between acoustic and electronic instrumentation is too familiar to belabor, but the case of Howie and Sawako was vastly more interesting to me. After all, if we were to follow the classic habit of sloppy music journalism, the nearly vacuous label "electronics" could be tagged to both of them. Howie's tabletop sports enough wires and knobs to place him way outside the realm of acoustic music, but here's where that terminological bugaboo of "electroacoustic" rears its head. When I think of this word, the first thing that pops into my mind is Vic Rawlings and his ever-fascinating sprawl across the acoustic-to-electronic continuum, from acoustic-cello-as-acoustic-instrument to acoustic-cello-as-electronic-instrument, from electronics-as-gestural-homomorphism to electronics-as-autonomous-machinery, and from electronics-as-psychoacoustics to electronics-as-electronics. And when I think of the dynamic conflict between electronics and electroacoustics, I think of a deeply frustrating set of music that involved Vic and transpired in September, 2003 during High Zero, which my festival review depicted thusly: "...one of the festival's biggest disappointments for me, especially as it involved two musicians who have consistently impressed me with their improvisational depth and ingenuity. Vic Rawlings' idiosyncratic modified cello and electronics are havens for minimalist electroacoustic delights, and this set was no exception, but while Rawlings made restrained attempts to commune with sonic singularities, Andy Hayleck was simply turning knobs and pressing buttons, letting cheesy and cliched electronic sounds mask Rawlings' nuances. This conflict was exacerbated by the uncomfortable mismatch between Hayleck's medium dynamics and Rawlings' soft dynamics. In my mind, this set dramatized the divide between electronic music and electroacoustic music." (By the way, note that Andy had only recently begun focusing on electronics and previously had a well-etched identity as a brilliant electroacoustician especially known for his gong + wire work.) What I'm referring to in both the Rawlings/Hayleck and Stelzer/Sawako cases is not something as blatant as one person blasting away at gaudy volumes and rendering another person inaudible, but rather a situation where both people play quietly and ostensibly sensitively, but the electronics jump out of the mix at the expense of structural relationships, as if the electronicist is not confident their sounds can function at a lower volume.

It's no coincidence that Vic and Howie run together in my thoughts about analog vs digital and electroacoustic vs electronic. Besides being mates in the BSC, some of Howie's greatest moments are on the two discs of his trio with Vic and turntablist Jason Talbot—2000 recordings released on Editions Zero as an untitled split disc with a like-minded Greek trio and 2002 recordings released by BOXmedia as Open. Even in the rather dense, loud, and noisy sections, the trio created vivid shapes instead of mush, and the music is full of dramatic dynamic juxtapositions. Until the mega-classic Stelzer/Talbot duo disc Songs (2003) and Howie's monumental two-volume Cassette Recordings 98-04 (2004) were released—both no-brainers for my year-end top ten lists— those trio discs were the only real Stelzer fix I recall having on hand. I can't imagine a more prototypical example of an ensemble dealing exclusively in electroacoustic improvisation in contradistinction to electronic or acoustic improvisation. My general repulsion to "power electronics" stands in stark contrast to my pronounced enthusiasm for what I might call the "power electroacoustics" of that trio.

I think this volume issue—again, only a minor quibble with respect to the Howie/Sawako duo and taken mainly as a launchpad to other insights about Howie's music—largely reflects a distinction in internal sound organization, a kind of severe fullness of electronic sounds in which the vertical spaces between component frequencies you find in acoustically-derived sounds are mostly filled in. It's the difference between sounds that subtract from white noise and sounds that add to silence. In terms of dynamics, this means I hear more microscopic peaks and valleys as the dynamic contours of each component frequency do their own thing in the sorts of sounds used by Howie or other musicians I think of as paradigmatically electroacoustic. It's a case of less information being more information because too much information can result in self-cancellation.

These are matters I don't really understand, but it's Howie's curatorial work that has sent me fumbling in what appears to be a profitable direction. The following sentence appears on the inside jacket of his extraordinary 2004 two-disc compilation Intransitive Twenty-Three: "All music composed without the use of digital devices". Playing this era-defining and exquisitely selective multi-artist opus again and again in the past year or so (it was released in June last year) and thinking about that little sentence have greatly transformed my musical worldview. I don't have too many answers, but I'm starting to really like the questions. Even though Howie's own music doesn't appear at all on Twenty-Three, it's put this whole cassette thing into welcome focus for me and my conceptual confusion with his role in the BSC has entirely resolved. I can't begin to recommend Twenty-Three with adequate vigor. Anyway, listen to that comp and then think about that sentence. It's outright profound.

Shifting attention to the supra-phrasal level in the Howie/Sawako duo, the Achilles heel of digital looping factored into the set. There was a stunningly beautiful passage where Howie's faint ambling pulses merged with Sawako's delicate long tones following a familiar reverse-tape-loop envelope, and I noticed that for a while I wasn't distinguishing their sounds at all—which is generally a great thing in my opinion—until my attention was diverted by the rigid looping structure that was a dead-giveaway to the digital provenance of that sound layer. Ah, rigid loops—so much for breathing, fluidity, moment form, and all the other good things in life. My loop detector gently swung into the red on several other occasions as well, structural weak-spots that break the spell I prefer to be under as a listener. I say "gently" because, you know, Sawako's parts were very generally quite appealing and subtle—and it was a uniformly low-volume set—but the music's in the details and those digital loop transitions are a real drag.

As much as I felt Sawako's barbaric digitalia sometimes intruded on Howie's delicate gestures, I have to report an absolutely marvelous and surprising perceptual flip-flop that occurred towards the end of the first piece! Check this out. Sawako generated something like a gentle breeze of indistinct crackles with the surface density of low-to-medium rainfall, sustaining it for several gorgeous minutes, and I was so locked into the tranquil texture that when Howie issued a typical cassette moan midway through I suddenly thought "fuck—what an annoying and disruptive sound"! So in that case Howie was the barbaric one! Talk about perceptual relativity! Incidentally, Sawako's brilliant passage there sadly degenerated after a few minutes when a typical transparent loop structure reared its ugly head.

The brief second piece was quite different and even more focused and subtle than the first. There was an incredible section where Sawako gave Howie's abstract crackles a glorious backdrop of extremely quiet continuous tones on the gentle, easy-listening edge of the sine wave prototype. Of course in this day and age that's kind of like playing hot speed-metal riffs, but hot is hot and it was hot. It was slamming. According to my notes, during this piece Howie created a "crawling, whirling, crackling miracle" about which I'm unable to offer further clarification. Still clear in my memory, though, is the feeling I had for a long stretch that the negative space between their relaxed gestures issued in a slow sequence—sometimes coming in alternation—could've been the ending of the piece each time. To me one of the most beautiful experiences in music is the quietude and resolution of a potential ending that becomes a patient pause instead of an actual ending. It's one of the major drawbacks to improvisation as a compositional methodology that these sorts of passages are so difficult to achieve because of extraneous psychological factors.

I do have one gripe about their set. It was way too short. I know that's a cliched form of praise, but I mean it very literally here as a complaint, not praise. They went to all the trouble of working on their craft for x years and setting up a gig and transporting themselves and their equipment, and the audience went to whatever lengths necessary to attend, only to play one medium-length piece and then act like they were done, only submitting to a second "short piece" (and it actually was short!) as if they were imposing on the audience and testing the boundaries of human decency. I mean, come on, gimme a break guys, play your music! It's what the audience came for. This was an exciting combination that surely has the creative resources to improvise for an hour or so and sustain or even surpass the level of innovative and riveting music they reached in that brief set. Geez, at least 45 minutes would be reasonable. The way I see it, Howie is modest to a fault about his music and doesn't accept the fact that an audience really wants to hear a full presentation of it. That's just my impression; if there's some deep conceptual justification for this practice I look forward to hearing about it. I can't speak for anyone else, but I think he has a lot more to say musically than anyone else I've ever seen him share a bill with, which includes some musicians I rather enjoy. I'm sure everyone can think of examples where a set went on too long, and too much of a great thing ceases to be great. Perhaps this habit (shared by his BSC comrades I might add), is some kind of over-compensation for this common problem as part and parcel of the palpable reaction in actual musical content against the perceived excesses of prior improv traditions. It's a shame, because there's just so much variety in his performance that a mere 20-30 minutes (I'm guessing Wednesday's set was somewhere around 25 minutes at most but I really have no facts to refer to) doesn't even begin to reach any kind of cognitive saturation point. I think Bhob Rainey's standard 20-minute solo set length is just right, but that's because of specific musical concepts of time he deals with that are quite unusual and unlike Howie's music, which deals with longer units at a basic vocabulary level and works well stretched out—he deals more in texture and less in drama. When I listen to Bhob's solo music on record, I tend to take it in small chunks like his concerts, but when I listen to Howie's Cassette Recordings 98-04 or Songs I often go for a full repeat spin. In any case, a little bit goes a long way for all these BSC cats, and that's meant as pure praise, so I can't complain too much.

Reflecting on my experiences seeing Howie live, this is the first time I've seen him do a duo since becoming a serious fan in the BSC-era, which really began for me personally 17 months ago when I finally saw and heard that revolutionary ensemble for the first time—during this period I've seen three BSC gigs, three solo gigs, and five wildly diverse ensemble sets during High Zero 2004. The duo is really a great format to get an earful of someone's vocabulary while also being able to thoroughly and directly compare it to their partner. Interestingly, in the years preceding my current focused interest in his work, I only saw two performances, but both were duos that left extremely strong impressions on me. The first one was so far back in the dim and distant past I'm unable to pinpoint the date beyond something in the 1997-98 neighborhood, at which time I had no clue about the whole Boston scene and was still just into avant-jazz and Euro-improv and pretty innocent of the experimental improv universe in general. Despite finding almost nothing of interest musically during the marathon all-night continuous film + improv event at the legendary and long-defunct Astrocade in Philadelphia organized by Ian Nagoski—whose guru-hood was already doubling or tripling his biological years—I still remember this clean-cut guy going ape-shit leaning over a table and attacking knobs and buttons like a boxer and creating these violent rhythms. The music passed way over my head, but the visual spectacle was unforgettable and seeped well into my subconscious. It was Howie in duo with another great Boston artist, Brendan Murray. This was action music in a much deeper sense than the conceptual nuggets of Nam June Paik and his crowd in the 60s. (I vaguely recall a bizarre trumpet player at a different point that night, and I'm just now registering the thought that it was Greg Kelley several years before I had the faintest inkling of Nmperign, and in a duo with Vic if I'm not mistaken!)

Several years later, late 2000 perhaps, I saw something that I still talk about with wild-eyed enthusiasm to this very day, a Stelzer/Talbot duo at the Red Room. (There were two other great sets that night too, including a wonderful Seth Cluett solo of meditatively rubbing things on two pieces of amplified glass.) This was improvised music in a category far removed from anything I've seen before or since. I've never seen such uncanny timing between two people freely improvising. They played completely insane, violent, explosive music that had rhythmic clarity and complexity, wild dynamic variation, and radical timbres—it was like the old Batman TV show when they'd have a thrilling sequence of onomatopoeia bursting on the screen—but somehow they were always together and would play these short "songs" with jaw-dropping perfect endings as if they were two people riding bikes and getting smashed by a Mack truck only to fly through the air, bounce off hoods and windshields, twist and contort every which way, and then land on their feet unscathed at the same time standing next to each other to take a bow. It was unreal. (Their duo disc Songs doesn't really capture that feeling much at all, but it does capture a different kind of interaction that's almost as great. I think the trios with Vic are closer to what I saw that night, but only in snatches.) The only musician I can imagine achieving something that explosive and rhythmically advanced is Mats Gustafsson, but as far as a duo, I'm not sure who would fit the bill, although his mega-classic trio disc with Zerang and Blonk has some stuff in that direction, albeit at low volumes. Hmm, why not Howie? Yes, a Stelzer/Gustafsson duo—why didn't this happen a long time ago, and if it did, can someone please tell me about it?!

I'm proud to be able to present a vintage, rare photo of this legendary performance here! As a matter of considerable significance in the history of balloon music, note that Jason Talbot is blowing on a balloon scrap somehow fashioned into a reed-like arrangement with the turntable transducer. Like all balloon-sourced sounds, it was incredible and I believe the same technique appears on Songs. Note that they are both standing; the set featured a great deal of bodily movement as they experienced the exciting rhythms in a manner not unlike punk rock musicians. At the end of each piece, they'd straighten their spines a bit, look up and smile together, then lurch into another piece and resume jerking motions while hunched over their machines. The audience went wild, if memory serves me correctly.

Well, I've only scratched the surface of the massive topic of Howard Stelzer, and there's much that I'd rather leave to more knowledgeable commentators. I should also emphasize that outside of his own music, there's precious little overlap in our musical taste. I find his own music a thousand times more interesting than 98% of the music he promotes or enthuses over, assuming I've even heard it, which is rarely the case. (Among that 2% is the warped and mind-warping masterpiece by Nerve Net Noise he released on Intransitive, one of my most prized possessions.) In fact, I strongly suspect that whatever I'm hearing in his music is not at all what he hears or intends to be heard, and that my loquacious celebration of his music is a disservice and misrepresentation. What I'd like to do now is examine a broader context for his medium of cassette deconstructionism by way of contrast with the other two significant cassette-based musicians I've recently experienced live, Aki Onda and Gust Burns.

Despite a tabletop cluttered with cheap cassettes and portable players—which can be seen above—Onda's methodology and music bear only a faint passing resemblance to Howie's. He began the set by simply playing a field recording of birds or the like for a few minutes; nice stuff I suppose, but a reflection of the cassette medium only to the extent of transparent functionality. I may have been the only person in the audience who lives on 20 acres of diverse and flourishing flora and fauna and wakes up most mornings to densely layered birdsong from a great many species. I hope the field recordings were more interesting to the city folks who inhabit windowless shoeboxes or the like. After the field recording warmup he jumped into what turned out to be his standard operating mode: lots of loops and electronic processing. Onda immediately revelead his love for echo effects and a sense of restraint and nuance comparable to a 70s funk-pop album. We're talking echo echo ECHO eCHO Echo, echo echo echo, Eeeeeeecho, eeeecho, eechochocho, eeeecho, echo echo echo, echo, eecho, eeecho, eeeecho, eeeeecho, eeeeeecho, echo echo echo... Basically, the content of his music was generated primarily by his processing equipment and only mildly augmented by cassette-isms as one of many sound resources. You'll note yet more snazzy and elegant devices with knobs and buttons below. Whatever he was doing with all those machines was technically very clever and polished. He was able to pretty much just stand around most of the time with lots of thick and repetitive sound coming out of his powerful amps.

Like Howie, however, he did play a walkman in a direct physical way as reconstructed instrument in many sections, though it was closer to rock tambourine than the Frith/Rowe/Gustafsson/Kelley instrumentalism Howie deals in. He had one sound and he used it as a kind of periodic riff to accent his canned looping textures, and when he got into a groove with it he achieved something like swaying dance pop without any beats or melodies. In fact, I found it entirely pleasant and that bit reminded me of the stunning and truly experimental pop masterpiece he made a few years ago with Haco and Ikue Mori that was released just a few months ago on Tzadik under the group name Synapse, on which I find it difficult to identify his specific contributions, a kind of mystery that I think attests to the wonderful chemistry between the three eccentric veterans. Come to think of it, I saw that trio do their sole concert presentation of that material at Tonic at the time of the recording sessions, which was really fabulous, but I really have no memory of Onda's techniques then. I hear his performances are quite diverse, and he's certainly an accomplished technician who has the chops to work in several directions.

There was one fairly brief piece in the middle of his set that really enraptured me, an insane, loud, dense collage of something resembling birdsong that was abruptly and prematurely cut off after sustaining a Dumitrescu-like level of intensity for something in the 3-5 minute range. I really don't know what those sounds were or how they were being presented, but to me they blurred the distinction between a swarm of blackbirds (thousands of which I occasionally hear right in front of my house in their loud, frightening, asynchronous chorus) and some kind of symphony of cassette squeals with a vocal or birdsongish quality. It was like a Yasunao Tone deluge without glitches. Just unbelievable, mind-blowing stuff, and a total shock and contrast to the other parts of the set. I would love to hear that extended over a CD-length piece (a la Tone's Solo for Wounded CD, a mesmerizing and tear-jerkingly beautiful continuous assault of densely-layered rippling microrhythms).

I will have to really strain here to eke out some further positive remarks and not commit some kind of social faux pas like mentioning the distinct and persistent boredom I experienced for most of the set. Let's see, he seems to have some kind of clever color coding for his cassettes, which are very charming to look at. Onda is, after all, a noted visual artist. I wonder if that's Keiko doing the tapping or two separate things? Hmm, if he takes requests and appears on another bill with Howie in the future, I think I'll go for a mix of the tapping and the African stuff. With some extra echo.

Compared to Howie, Onda's work in the set I witnessed was not an exploration of timbre and phrasing constrained by the intrinsic qualities of the cassette medium to any significant extent. The medium functioned more as a quirky sampling method than a source of content. The case of Gust Burns is somewhere in between the two in terms of a continuum between playback transparency and medium-as-message deconstruction. In terms of extra-cassette-based methodology, the polar divide between Onda's gadget-intensive maximalism and Howie's stripped-down minimalism is even more dramatic for Gust, who deals with the medium in about the simplest way possible, just a few cassette players and some cassettes, no mixer, no effects units, no microphone relays. Heck, he even foregoes a table and just does his business on the floor in the style of Michael Johnsen or Chris Cooper, at least when I saw him.

On April 15, 2005 at The Rotunda in Philadelphia, I had the pleasure of attending one of Jack Wright's Nonet mini-festivals and discovering Gust's astonishing craft. Alongside concerts by Joe Maneri, PAK, and Trockeneis, that night was the glowing highlight of my live music experiences in 2005 so far, several large chunks of infinitely subtle music about as good as anything I've heard in the lowercase vein (even though two of the six sets were mediocre), which reflected the talents of Gust in equal measure to those of Jack Wright (saxes), Andrew Lafkas (doublebass), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Catherine Pancake (dry ice, percussion), and Chris Forsyth (electric guitar). It was this sextet that spun a magically delicate weave of inobtrusive but timbrally intoxicating sounds, and it was a spell-binding, miraculous trio with Jack and Chris that served as my very first reception of Gust's sound gifts. I deeply regret not documenting the many riches of that evening at the time, especially since the winds of fate blew recording equipment out of the grasp of the participants, and alas the moment has long passed, but I have both vivid memories and copious notes with which to depict the timely and germane matter of Gust's cassette improvisation.

I was rather taken aback to see this fellow crouched over some cassette decks in the trio set—I'd never imagined there was anyone else in the world doing anything like Howie, though now I suspect a few more cassette artists are lurking out there and I hope to see their names in the Commentellen below. Not hearing anything like Howie's sound palette coming from his corner, the incredibly quiet and sparse music left me at a loss to perceptually isolate his contributions at first, and I had the great pleasure of experiencing a musical illusion of sorts when I began hearing some ephemeral and thrilling soft squeaky sounds that I took to be an epiphenomenal layer of saxophone sound coming from Jack, who I'd grown well accustomed to hearing rather surprising sounds from, especially in the wake of his monumental close-miked 2004 solo recordings. Well, imagine my delight to suddenly realize it was Gust's tapes and not Jack! So Gust and my ears were off to a very auspicious start. At other points Gust dealt in a vocabulary that was strikingly similar to Michel Doneda and Alessandro Bosetti. I feel like crying that this piece wasn't recorded, because it would send shockwaves around the lowercase-improv community. All three were introducing totally fresh sounds with a unity of structural intent and perfect dynamic and spatial balance that didn't falter for a second, and Chris offered the most ingenious and subtle lowercase guitar improvising I've ever witnessed, with some very fresh techniques (if you can believe that!) that were as revelatory as Gust's thin traces of sound. It was as if the sounds of all three players were moving around the room together through the air and gracefully, slowly merging over in one corner or another, only to split into geometrically elegant skew lines as they gently bounced off a wall with the timing of a paradiddle. Well, I suppose the beautiful and spacious physical environment of The Rotunda and the irreplicable psychoacoustic particularities of my listening experience would be lost to a recording and the shockwaves really belong to us whose ears were in those moments.

What revealed itself in this set was Gust's basic technique of using a cassette player as a sampler, but with a sense of simplicity, directness, and subtlety in stark contrast to Aki Onda's ambitious and baroque looping headlines. Gust dealt with volume at the level of modulating actual sound content; in other words, his sounds were sometimes so soft they could only be heard as a poetic shadow of indistinct whispering. He also used the built-in old-fashioned thumbwheel volume control of the cassette players to control his phrasal timing. Further, he dealt with simultaneously controlling multiple players and the resulting direct sound combinations. These techniques are trivial compared to Howie's virtuosity, but what Gust was offering was an equally advanced musical sensibility in brilliant service of the musical whole. Simplicity of technique, but virtuosity of ear and intention. As with most of Jack's Nonet events, there was a shared understanding that the lowercase aesthetic would be favored, as Jack conceives of these as a type of workshop for research and development among a group of like-minded improvisors. As such, I imagine Gust would reveal a very different musical personality in other contexts. He is, in fact, originally and still a pianist in equal measure to a tape-smith.

Much like Howie, however, though to a lesser extent, Gust also dealt with gentle subversions of the players' ordinary functions, manually manipulating the speed of playback and the conditions of the head/tape interface inside the machine. He also made significant use of tuning forks, seeking the tape head for their transduction.

Much to my shock, when I exchanged my first words with him between sets and Howie's name burst from my lips, I learned that Gust had never even heard the slightest rumour of such a fellow as the granddaddy of cassette improv we have turned our attention to today. Querying repeatedly in disbelief I had to accept that this was a truly independent stream of musical development slowly meshing with the Baltimore/Boston improv corridor that's been thriving for the past decade. Gust mentioned that his close associate Bryan Eubanks splits his efforts between saxophones and some kind of cassette thing, but sadly I haven't yet crossed paths with this well-regarded member of Jack's circle and Nonet alumnus. Gust appears to come from an especially obscure and marginalized circle of US improvisors in the non-Californian Western half of the country, brought to my fair region of the Mid-Atlantic by virtue of Jack and Andrew's enterprising spirit of community and current locus of focus in the Philly/NYC area, but it would appear that the burgeoning Boston improv scene has suffered a lack of exposure in those flourishing hinterlands of self-sufficient musical experimentalism. Actually, I've yet to garner much in the way of facts as to these geographically underpriviledged pockets of fascinating improvisors Jack has brought into the fold through his unrelenting travels over the years, so I may be distorting the case a bit and we can look forward to future expositions of the American improv underground from the participants themselves and curious listeners like myself. There is a minor subcultural revolution unfolding beneath our noses I suspect.

I hesitate to dish out wild-eyed praise for someone based on only one encounter with their work, but over the course of the evening I heard Gust in three distinct ensemble configurations and he didn't make a single fruitless gesture. The sextet set mentioned above was a defining moment in the current era of free improvisation and a very personal milestone for me as I observed six people from very different backgrounds and affiliations, all of whom besides Gust I've been nourishing an intimate engagement with as a listener, quite intensely so for many years in the cases of Jack, Nate, and Catherine, create a truly new form of music with complete aesthetic unity. There's a wealth of complex historical factors that led up to this point, but first and foremost it's the galvanizing efforts of Jack Wright that deserve credit for the current situation of profound improvisational fertility, especially in the lowercase direction. The sextet piece was much like the BSC at their most restrained, and of course it's Bhob Rainey, Greg Kelley, James Coleman, and others from that iconic ensemble of the current era that planted many seeds in the American underground before the lowercase aesthetic became an ordinary option for the average improvisor. In fact, the BSC's mighty man on the big fiddle, Mike Bullock, was a participant in this very same evening, and along with his intimate colleagues Dave Gross and Tucker Dulin, he participated in an unfocused nonet set that had its moments, including a lovely episode of contextually surprising lyrical extroversion from Dave. It was a momentous gathering of talent, and in my focus on Gust I'm certainly doing an injustice to the event in its rich totality.

I'm absolutely thrilled that the cassette concept has two distinctive practitioners in the same overarching musical community, just like the vital multiple voices on saxophone, trumpet, percussion, doublebass, etc that give this community—which is truly a global community—it's guarantee of endless permutational profit. Let's hope for a few more inspired cassette deconstructionists in the near future. While we're at it, we could use a lot more balloonists and daxophonists! These are all much cheaper than laptops and samplers if it helps the cause! In fact, I've got some wacky cassettes from my youth I'd be happy to pass along to anyone pressed for source material!

~Michael Anton Parker

Check out Howie's great Listed feature on Dusted!

The Contemporary Jazz Quintet - Actions 1966-1967

UMS/Atavistic 250

At the outset of the 1960s, jazz in Europe was still very much based upon the innovations of its American forebears. Jazz was, after all, significantly appreciated in a continent rebuilding itself from war as a way to create artistic assertions as it recovered from cultural and economic leveling. Yet as bebop and hardbop became less relevant following the innovations of Ornette, Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor, Europ